


It's A Monster, Scully: Mulder and Scully Meet the Meaning of Life

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [38]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Review, Episode: s10e03 Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 10:18:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5924773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The argument “Were-Monster” is making about The X-Files is a bit revisionist, but refreshing nonetheless. Thanks to Chris fucking Carter, watching The X-Files replicates modernity’s loss of faith in transcendent meaning. We follow the mythology episodes, we wait and wait for the signs and omens to resolve themselves into something coherent which will give our experience meaning, but in the end that promise of revelation turns out to be nothing but a cruel hoax. You want hope?, says “Were-Monster.” You want zest for life? You want a reason to live? Forget secret scripture and grand narratives. Come to the Monster Of the Weeks. We’ll take care of you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's A Monster, Scully: Mulder and Scully Meet the Meaning of Life

  


I have spent most of today hating digital technology. In the olden days, when you couldn’t be there for an episode of must-see TV, you set the VCR–and as long as you had actually learned how to program it correctly and the power didn’t go off, once you had time to view it you just popped the tape in and it unrolled, uninterrupted. Today, no joke, I spent 5 hours trying to stream 45 minutes worth of television. True, it’s basically my fault that I don’t have cable, let alone TiVo, and that my home internet connection is terrible, but that doesn’t explain it all. Fox’s episode viewer has given me more trouble in the past two weeks than NBC’s, ABC’s, or Netflix’s ever has. I’ve seen that ‘interactive ad’ for _Deadpool_ a hundred fucking times–and still have no interest in seeing that or any other mutant superhero movie–and watched the motel sequences about 50 times in approximately 300 two-second chunks. At last, my crappy connection did finally cough up the episode, about 45 minutes before I had to go pick up my kid from school. So now I’m reviewing it at 11:00pm, because in this modern world we live in, that’s when I have the time to do it.

You will have deduced from the above paragraph, if you did not know it already, that I am old. I am, in fact, just about the same age as Gillian Anderson, which means I am a few years younger than David Duchovny, though frankly I have not weathered as well as either of them. So I am particularly well-equipped to appreciate one of the best things about this episode: its entertaining if not entirely original attempt to grapple with the big questions that find their way to us all–one way or another–once we get too old to outrun them.

Like James Wong in “Founder’s Mutation,” Darin Morgan has done something here that Chris Carter sadly failed to do in “My Struggle”: he’s let Mulder grow. Which means letting him get older. Which means letting the show’s big questions change…and even allowing Mulder the occasional answer. The argument “Were-Monster” is making about The X-Files–because make no mistake, this is a meta episode, Darin Morgan has been eating, breathing, and smoking meta since “Humbug”–is a bit revisionist, but refreshing nonetheless. Thanks to Chris fucking Carter, watching The X-Files replicates modernity’s loss of faith in transcendent meaning. We follow the mythology episodes, we wait and wait for the signs and omens to resolve themselves into something coherent which will give our experience meaning, but in the end that promise of revelation turns out to be nothing but a cruel hoax. There is no metanarrative, no Truth, no gospel that will one day dignify the chaos, terror, and absurdity through which we are lurching. You want hope?, says “Were-Monster.” You want zest for life? You want a reason to live? Forget secret scripture and grand narratives. Come to the Monster Of the Weeks. We’ll take care of you.

All of this, of course, is said not directly to us, but through Mulder. Mulder starts this episode thinking that what he really needs is to “put away childish things”–to give up his belief in the marvelous, the wondrous, and the fantastic and embrace the cold hard realism from which he has been in full flight since the day we met him. And the rest of the episode is about teaching him that he’s wrong.

Were it not for the way all technology is conspiring to VEX ME today, I would have led with an image from one of my favorite bits: the post-credits scene in the basement office, in which Mulder throws pencil darts at The Poster while flipping through the old files. In a wonderfully compressed little piece, Morgan shows us more growth in Mulder’s character than Chris Carter allowed in nine years. Though The Google is not mentioned, I think it is certainly implied that the Internet is the prime suspect in the ruthless slayings of the mysteries contained in the paper files now strewn ankle-deep around the office. With the extinction of physical media comes the snuffing-out of the unknown and the inexplicable; in a digitized world where you can find anything on YouTube, it’s impossible to put enough distance between any phenomenon and its explanation to keep even Mulder believing in its mystery. Acknowledging himself as “a middle-aged man”–endearingly, he seems to think his middle-aged-ness will come as a revelation to Scully–living in a brave new world of which he cannot really be a full citizen, he’s decided that the thing to do is give up on monsters.

This is a much bigger reversal for Mulder than the Great Skeptic/Believer Reversal of Season 5, or the reversal we just saw in “My Struggle.” Instead of rejecting one conspiracy theory in favor of another, what Mulder is rejecting here is the very idea of The Truth. He’s entertaining the possibility that in fact there may be nothing unseen or unexplained or mysterious about human existence; that in fact what we see has always been what we get, and that there is no enlightenment to which a blurry photo taken in 1972 might one day lead him. What Scully has to say to all this is, “Mulder…have you been taking your medication?”

The way she says it, you can’t quite decide whether she’s concerned because she thinks she *has* taken his medication or because she thinks he *hasn’t.* We know from “My Struggle” that she believes Mulder is depressed. So are a lot of middle-aged people. But is Mulder’s depression a biochemical problem with a biochemical solution; or is it actually a healthy response to the fucked-up life he’s leading in a world which he knows to be far more fucked-up than almost anyone else realizes? Is it, in fact, merely part of the condition of being middle-aged, of being no longer young, no longer having ‘potential’, facing down the end of the road and the final summing-up and feeling–as Scully spends much of “Never Again” feeling–as if you are wasting the life you have left, without being able to figure out what else you should be doing with it?

“Were-Monster” gives Mulder a chance to work all this out by forcing him to confront his double, the surprisingly philosophical were-lizard Guy Mann. Guy’s going through his own midlife crisis–although for him, it’s his *whole* life, or at least his whole life as a human. That’s all human consciousness is, for Guy–worrying about how to survive economically while simultaneously worrying about the obvious fact that the work you have to do to survive economically is a tragic waste of your precious life. Of course his crisis is amplified by the fact that he works at a smartphone store. People wait for every new iPhone like it’s the second coming of Christ; but the whole point of consumer desire in a capitalist society is that it can never be satisfied, and so Guy’s job is to maliciously encourage a search for meaning which is even more doomed than Mulder’s. 

Darin Morgan has been down this road before. Guy’s speech about learning that “we die” recalls, for all of us, the title character of “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” whose paranormal gift is the ability to foresee exactly when and how any person he sees will meet their end. Bruckman’s oppressive consciousness of the inevitability of death has drained all the joy out of life for him. But twenty-odd years on, Morgan now presents our consciousness of death as, potentially, therapeutic–as the one thing capable of conquering the petty anxieties inspired by our desperate attempts to ensure our own economic survival. The turning point in the case–the monster part of the case, anyway; I’ll be talking about the serial killer part of it later on–happens in a graveyard, where both Guy and Mulder are taking the ‘witch doctor’s advice and trying to bury their smaller anxieties by confronting the Big One. Into this archetypal graveyard scene, of course, Morgan has incorporated some hard evidence of his own coming mortality: the headstone engraved with Kim Manners’s name. One of the ways we learn what Guy’s just learned–that “it all ends up here”–is by seeing people from our own generation die. The actual death of Kim Manners, one of the great X-Files directors, reminds us that although the show itself is immortal–you can watch the pilot episode now, it looks fresher than the day it was made–the stars, the producers, the directors, everyone who made it and everyone who watches it, we’re all mortal.

Kim Manners was real and so is his death; the headstone is fake. This touching gesture is thus part of a whole game “Were-Monster” is playing with the question of what constitutes ‘reality,’ or what can ever ‘make sense’ on a show like The X-Files. In my rewatch review of “Clyde Bruckman,” I talked about it as a critique of [the serial-killer craze of the 1990s](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F1517390&t=N2IxMjUyODVjM2MzMWY5NTk2OTcxYmIxZGZkMjg1NDcwNzYxNDhhOCx6ZXBiR2w1bA%3D%3D), something carried through in the way “Were-Monster” treats the actual murder plot. “I gave up profiling before I gave up monsters,” says an exasperated Mulder. “You’ve seen one serial killer, you’ve seen ‘em all.” Not even Scully wants to hear the killer’s canned pop-psychology ‘explanation’ of why he does what he does; we have conventionally agreed to accept this as a ‘realistic’ explanation for horrific human violence, but it’s ultimately just as meaningless, just as absurd, as the story Guy tells about his transformation. “I’m just looking for some internal logic,” says Mulder. “Why?” retorts Guy. “There’s no external logic.” Why should a story about a were-lizard have to behave like an episode of Law & Order? Why do we demand realism from a show that exists to serve our stubborn craving for something more?

At the end of the day, “Were-Monster” tells us, we don’t just want, we *need* to believe in the fantastic, even as we also sort of need to know that the things we believe in aren’t materially real. My favorite thing about this layer of “Were-Monster” is the way Morgan’s direction gleefully, repeatedly, and rampantly violates the cardinal rule of X-Files cinematography: shoot it in the dark and never let people get a really good look at the creature. Of course this was done partly to create the horror and the suspense; but it was also part of Carter’s fear of commitment, of ever really just coming right out and saying yes, these monsters are real–at least as real as anything else on the show. Not all the MOTWS on the X-Files were genius. They ran the gamut from legitimately terrifying to irretrievably silly. Instead of being embarrassed by silliness, “Were-Monster” revels in it, with numerous high-definition full-body shots of a creature who, instead of hiding in the shadows, seems to have an instinctive propensity to run TOWARD the camera. Why, Chris, asks “Were-Monster,” were you so worried about making the monsters ‘real’? Of course they’re real–and of course they’re not. Of course the were-lizard is real, you’re fucking looking right at him–and yet of course it’s not, because obviously this is a human in a lizard suit, which is just as obviously a mask as those hideous taxidermy heads in the Peeping Tom Motel (one of which, I hope everyone noticed, was a jackalope).

This ties in to the extended joke about cell phones. Mulder is all wise and worldly in that scene with Scully about how the creature can’t be real because otherwise someone would have caught it on a cameraphone; smartphones, like the Google, have taken all the ambiguity and mystery out of life. But the whole point of the CGI morphing is that digital technology only makes it HARDER for us to trust images, or to believe in anything we see. Back in “E.B.E.,” it took government conspiracy hacks to (unconvincingly) fake a photo of a flying saucer. These days any idiot can make better fakes in ten minutes with Photoshop. The Internet can make anything ‘real,’ even Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

So I love it that Morgan finally gives Mulder what he’s always wanted–proof, at least to his OWN satisfaction, that monsters do exist, and that the unexplained–or, as Guy calls it, the absurd–is still both ‘out there’ and in here, lurking in both the misty forests of Oregon and in the dark mystery of our own mortality. Sure, let Mulder talk to the monster, let him touch the monster, let him see the monster in full color with his very own eyes. It won’t kill the mystery, Chris, and it won’t end the show.

Of course Scully still doesn’t believe in the monster–but, as Mulder surely finally realizes, that is OK. He doesn’t need Scully to believe; he doesn’t even really want Scully to believe. What he knows, and what perhaps he really wants most of all, is that she wants *him* to believe. That her ‘skepticism’ has never been about trying to put out that light in his eyes or forcing him to share her more hard-headed view of life, the universe, and everything. It’s not antagonistic; it’s supportive. It’s there to keep him from completely going off the deep end; and it’s there to get him through the valleys between the peaks, when he can’t sustain the optimism that keeps bringing him back out on the monster hunt. It’s Scully’s reminder of what it is that they are supposed to do for a living–catch killers, bring them to justice, stop them from killing again–that helps him get through the initial despair of the “questioning phase,” and eventually recover his desires.

Speaking of Mulder’s desires…obviously this is a great episode for the MSR and nobody needs me to tell them that. She is so genuinely glad to see him back–to see him climbing out of the depression and recovering the desire to believe that makes him *her* Mulder. That she doesn’t believe him for a minute doesn’t change how much she loves the way he keeps striving after something more, keeps looking for all those things we need, all the things we’re supposed to give up on once we’re no longer children. He needs to believe these things are real in a way that she doesn’t; but that, in a way, is what has always kept them together, and it doesn’t have to be a source of conflict or misery. If Mulder is us, in his desire for the strange and fantastic, then Scully is also us in that she can love these monsters for Mulder’s sake, even if she knows that somewhere in the makeup trailer, there’s an actor peeling off that lizard suit.

There are things about this episode I was not crazy about. The “humans are the real monsters” thing is not new and it was applied with too heavy a sledgehammer; and I did not need the Scully/Guy porn fantasy. Scully’s line–”anyway, I’m immortal”–is a funny callback to “Clyde Bruckman” (and “Tithonus,” and maybe “Bad Blood”), but it also shows you that unlike Mulder, she really hasn’t been allowed (in this episode) to get old or to have this crisis. On some level she remains a fantasy–every Guy’s and every Mann’s–untouched by time and age and death. Whatever was going on with the transgendered thing as a metaphor for the were-lizard’s transformation, it was confused and unhelpful and I just wish they hadn’t, though I did love the performer (”Are you on crack?” “*duh* YEAH!”). But there’s so much else in this episode that is just wonderful and hilarious–just watching the video of Mulder screaming into his cameraphone makes me laugh every time–that I will not stop too long to complain. “Were-Monster” makes a strong case for the humble MOTW as the heart of the X-Files–a heart far more reliable than its brain, if we are to locate that in the mythology arc. Thank you Darin Morgan, you get a fruit basket right after I send James Wong his.


End file.
